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The Half-Life 2 developer is launching their own Steam-based operating system.

In the first of three announcements, game publisher and developer Valve revealed a new Linux-based operating system, SteamOS designed to bring the Steam platform and PC gaming to the living room.

"As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself," the SteamOS page reads. "SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines."

The new operating system will be available soon, and is designed to work with Valve's Big Picture Mode, which makes Steam more accessible on TVs.

According to Valve, the company has seen "significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level."

In keeping with Valve's spirit of user-generated content, the new game-focused operating system will be "open" though to what degree remains to be seen.

"Content creators can connect directly to their customers," according to Valve, and users "can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love."

Gamers will also be able to stream content from their Windows and Mac PCs directly to their SteamOS device. This means that at the very least, gamers will not be restricted to SteamOS compatible content only so long as they have a Windows PC as well.

It's likely that more news about an actual SteamBox will come in one of the two future updates, though whether Valve plans to produce their own device or rely on third-party manufacturers to make the SteamBox a reality remains to be seen (or some combination of both.)

With PCs powered by SteamOS instead of Windows and monetized via the Steam Store, Valve is setting itself up as a major player in both the home PC and living room spaces.

It's possible one announcement could also have to do with a new game. The prevalence of circles, blue rings, and so forth is very Portal-like. Certainly a new first-party Valve game would be a great companion to the launch of SteamOS and the SteamBox. Portal 3 would be a natural choice.

According to Valve "SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers."